You might be Agile if...

Published Sep 15, 2017

Bad implementations often ruin good ideas.

Take Scrum, for instance. It’s surprising to me how many organizations say “We’ve tried Scrum; it just didn’t work for us.” I am tempted to reply “You did it wrong!” but instead, I usually ask a bunch of questions that are strong indicators of trouble:

Are your customers involved frequently during the development process?

Do you have strong product owners with a clear vision of what success means?

Does the team communicate openly and honestly during stand-ups and retrospectives?

Does the team adapt based on feedback received during showcases and retrospectives? (this applies to everything: coding practices, team ceremonies, metrics used, working conditions… everything that pertains to team success is fair game)

Does everyone on the team buy into the vision of success, and the metrics used to measure progress?

Are QA, BA, UX and PM treated by the Dev team as first-class citizens on the team?

You might be agile if you can answer Yes to the above. If not, there are many legitimate reasons why it failed for you, that have nothing to do with Scrum itself.